Reassessing New Labour: Market, State and Society under Blair and Brown

The Political Quarterly’s Reassessing New Labour: Market, State and Society under Blair and Brown is an authoritative evaluation of the long-term legacy of New Labour. It embraces thinkers and commentators from across the progressive and liberal centre-left including Baroness Shirley Williams, John Denham MP, Vernon Bogdanor, John Curtice, Dan Corry, Tim Horton, Paul Gregg, Kitty Ussher, Guy Lodge and Alan Finlayson. The collection is a foretaste of the realigned, plural politics that Labour will need to create if it is to challenge the Coalition Government four years from now.

Since the election there have been numerous ideologically-inspired accounts of where it all went wrong; as yet there has been little insightful engagement with the complex history of New Labour. As a result key lessons have yet to be learned, and the central dilemma of whether the strategic assumptions that informed the centre-left’s modernising project in the mid-1990s are relevant now, has not been confronted. This book aims to fill that void.